Summertime
by TwinMoons
Summary: Winter is coming to the eternal summer at last---though despite that it's more of a light conversation between two people who aren't quite humans. Probably is worse than it sounds. R+r is appreciated.


**Summertime**

The world hung low beneath them, bleeding sky-blue. The red blood that flowed from its heart's veins had long ago returned to its form, backwards in its path toward the body that had became hollow. Nothing and everything had existed then, and thus the place that happened was impossible. But in the end, the blood found its power to go on : its power to live. They remembered how one boy, whose face was forgotten and remembered, summed it up in only one sentence.

_Because I know that those feelings are real._

"So is pain. And loss," a figure whispered. He was fire-and-ashes, red and grey, enveloped in a pair of four-pronged wings shining with warmth. They shifted occasionally to the unseen winds in their place far above air, holding their owner aloft.

His partner, a girl who was fire-and-ice, said nothing. Quiet was in her nature, as silent as a drop of water falling into the ever singing sea. Her wings were six-pronged, and she held them fully spread, covering the world in its grandeur. Both of them were as pale as the dead.

"I think, nevertheless, that he understood when he made the choice," the boy continued, obviously used to his companion's silence. "Still, I wonder if they have learn what it meant. Winter is coming to their eternal summer. Already I see some parts of it turning to red again, though it was a red of sleep and not of sadness. The decision did that. The world changed again, and maybe given time it would return to the way it was anew. But that factor they do not have," he sighed. "I wonder if they would learn the meaning of it all in time."

Fire-and-ice shook her head slightly. "They will. They will not. What does that mean to us? They mean nothing to us. It is done."  
  
The boy smiled, sadly, gently. "Would you have said that, you who are the same as I, if it were _them_ now? Will it be ice, or will it be fire?"

She stiffened. Her wings grew dangerously ablaze. "Does it matter what I think?"  
  
"It was your choice as much as his."

"He did not choose me," she whispered, looking down on the world she once knew. It was a world of eternal summer, of eternal bliss. Yet all was deceptive, as no true happiness could exist in nothing that lasted. Her wings faded, and he had to catch her arm to prevent her from falling. When they had finally regained their balance above the rolling vista of the planet, the girl had got back her icy composure as well. Fire-and-ashes eyed her thoughtfully.

"It did not matter who he chose. That was not the point, and you know that as well as I do. It was almost you who goaded that point unto him," he said, after a long moment of thinking. "Does that hurt still? Even after knowing, does it hurt?"  
  
She looked at him bitterly. "I am not like you," she said, her voice seething with something that could only be called with a remembered name of hatred and hate. "I knew how it is to have a human heart."  
  
"Do I not?"  
  
"You may have a human spirit, but not the heart. Here," Fire-and-ice said. She pointed to her chest. "Here throbs the heart, which I have and you have as well." Her ghostly blue hair blew carelessly in the winds generated from her spanning wings. "But it is not a _human_ one. That one beats somewhere else."

"Where then?" the boy questioned, his own wings unfolding.

"Here." The girl didn't point, but showed with her eyes and the fires that blazed within them. "Here is what it meant to be human."

Fire-and-ashes nodded. "Pain, sorrow and loss. Happiness, love and jealousy," he said. "Two sides of the same coin. I would rather have it that the coin does not have sides at all. It is the same being of light or of earth. The walls of the heart keep our shape, and so it is the same."

"It is not!" she shouted. It reminded her of the time when she rejected something very different but the same nonetheless: _I am not your doll._

He tsked. "You are _most_ stubborn. I know that your soul is not that of a human, the same as mine is not. You know this too. You say that you understand the human heart, but how would you know if I do or do not?" The four-pronged blades of light sliced into the air of the planet, yet it was unseen by mortal eyes. "Being us or being them; it is of no moment. The woman who held the cross said it most wisely. They are us who walked a different road, and the reverse is true as well."  
  
"They will remain themselves."  
  
The boy smiled again, this time with amusement. "So will they, and so will us. That is why we are, and we can't change that. Would you see the world with clearer eyes now, kin of mine?"

"No."  
  
"When Shinji described you, he said nothing about you being a most stubborn individual," he sighed threatically, slapping one pale hand or his forehead. It was so perfectly executed that for one moment Fire-and-ice forgot where they were in the argument and a corner of her mouth winded up into a very small smile. And he smiled back. It was acceptance.

"It is myself. My thoughts. Me," she said. Her wings grazed the skies as well.

Her companion laughed. "Then any further argument would be only moot. Come, would you care to see now? The world that he shaped?"

"Don't forget the second child. The one he chose. As well as…"

Fire-and-ashes grinned. "Let me amend that. The world they shaped. Or better yet, the world _we_ all shaped. For good or ill." His four-pronged wings spread fully, and he took off toward the blue below, laughing. "To paraphase a human : I'll even race you!"

The girl hung in the air for a moment, then made her decision. It might not be bad to race in the sky, after all.

~FIN~

Author's note : To all of you who actually read this piece of crap this far, thank you. Sincerely and truly. This is born out of an attempt to get my creative juices flowing again. As it stand, though, I think Dath Writer's block still haven't left my side. long, long sigh It got truly Disney-like at the end…I need to get in touch with my Eva side. Badly.

Disclaimer : Rei, Kaworu and Evangelion are not mine, never mine. They belong to the gods disguised as some company named Gainax.


End file.
